That Damned, Unnerving Uncertainty of It All— A Miniseries (Part 4 of 4)

Love’s Labor’s Lost
In my research of the major stories written about Penner’s death, including an unexpected conversation I had a few weeks ago with yet another of he and my brother’s co-workers at the O.C. L.A. Times, it is clear to me, if not to all who have commented on this sad tale, that perhaps the linchpin of Penner/Daniel’s ultimate demise was the one thing he couldn’t reverse; the devastation of the loss of his ten-year partner in marriage, fellow Times sportswriter, Lisa Dillman.

On July 19, 2007, exactly twelve weeks after Penner’s groundbreaking coming-out article, he legally changed his name to Christine Michelle Daniels. That same day, Dillman filed for divorce. Throughout the year in which Mike was Christine, those close to him indicate that he honestly thought the marriage could somehow be reconciled; that Dillman could eventually embrace his decision to live as a woman.

That reconciliation never came.

According to Friess, during the summer of 2008, as Daniels detransitioned back to Penner, he repeatedly told friends that it was his last-ditch effort to somehow reunite with Dillman.

Nevertheless, the divorce decree became final on October 24, 2008. The disenchantment and frustration endured as the impact of his life-decision registered, coupled with the reality that his true love would no longer be a part of his life, appears to have been the ultimate blow to Penner’s will.

A little more than a year later, the holiday shopping season’s official beginning would also be Mike Penner’s ultimate end. On the day after Thanksgiving — now so commonly referred to as, Black Friday — November 26, 2009, in his apartment building’s parking garage, Penner rigged a vacuum hose attached to the tailpipe of his running, parked car through a window, into the passenger compartment, ending his previously very vocal life in silence.

WHY? Can somebody just tell me, please, why??
It’s okay with me if you tune me out at this point, because I’ll give fair warning: I’m gonna wax quite a bit philosophical/metaphysical here.

The human interest aspect of the death of Mike Penner, as well as that which is imminent for my brother Alex, really have only the slightest of true relationships — that being that they were friends and that their lives ended or will end far too early.

I don’t really know why I was so compelled to spend the inordinate amount of time I did writing this post. I don’t know if it was simply because I felt the need to mourn the loss of Penner; someone I felt a great deal of respect for; someone I sort of felt I knew via association with my brother. Perhaps it’s just that it’s such a tremendously sad story, and it makes me realize how much I already miss Alex.

How very fragile, our existence seems at times; and though we actively acknowledge that this is true, we still ask, “why?”

Why am I losing my brother years — even decades too soon?

Why has the world lost a great writer and a great person in Mike Penner?

Why did Penner feel such despair in his life that he couldn’t bear to go on living?

It's almost poetic that prior to his death, Penner’s final regular assignment at The Times was writing the Morning Briefing column’s “Totally Random” feature. It seems the inexplicable machinations of fate that caused whatever physiological affectations responsible for laying askew my brother’s brain through Alzheimer’s and Penner’s self-image through his condition, known as dissociative gender identification, were equally ‘random.’

I mean, think about it. These were two people in the prime of their careers, who literally had the world by the tail. Only good things appeared to lie ahead for each of them.

How does any of this make sense?

Both were betrayed by genetics — my brother, with absolutely no recourse. As for Penner’s circumstance, if you choose to judge him, that’s your business. I choose to judge neither his choices nor his biological reality, but only to regret his tragically mistaken notion that you can go home again, because truly, more often than not, Thomas Wolfe was right.

Who would have ever thought 25 years ago that anything so tragic could become the current reality for each of these talented and cherished individuals?

Why it happened, and to what purpose we can never know.

The only correct response, I believe, is to remember both of them for who they were, to say a prayer in support of their families, and realize for yourself that each day, each moment, each simple pleasure we experience in this life is a gift.

Never take it for granted; never assume it’s deserved.

Be grateful for it. Savor it, lest that damned unnerving uncertainty that stalks us all, be allowed to steal our joy.

Life is not fair. The sun is caused to rise on the evil and the good, and rain upon the righteous and unrighteous alike.

Here’s hoping that each of us can make the most of things while we’re still high and dry.



* * * * * *


finis

That Damned, Unnerving Uncertainty of It All— A Miniseries (Part 2 of 4)

A Long, Long Times Ago...
Following the aforementioned email I rediscovered, I made a pointed search for a particular byline on the Los Angeles Times website. I was interested in learning about the current disposition of a writer who had been the subject of that email exchange I’d had with Alex’s wife in late April, 2007, when he had written a most unusual article about himself.

To my utter chagrin, instead of finding one of his current articles to catch up on, I discovered that Mike Penner, one of The Times’ best and brightest sportswriters by acclamation of all who knew and worked with him, following a tumultuous and very public two and-a-half year period in both his personal and professional life, committed suicide the day after Thanksgiving last year, November 27, 2009. It was Black Friday in more ways than one.

I was crushed, not only in stumbling upon the sad news, but even more so in the unjustifiable guilt I felt for having learned it so far after the fact.

Even more ironic, I thought, was that even coming in so late, the more I read, the more it seemed that I really wasn’t all that far behind others in commenting on what has rightfully become a blockbuster of a human interest story.

The saga of Penner's demise has obviously been big news at The Times, which published an expose on it this past March, but it has also been well-presented in major pieces by GQ Magazine in June of this year and, most recently, in last month’s article by Steve Friess in L.A. Weekly, posted on August 19, 2010.

Right about now you may be wondering why an L.A. Times sportswriter who who took his own life nine months ago has anything to do with a story about my brother Alex — or perhaps, why you should really even care. Well, the latter is up to you, but former, that's my bad.

I wasn’t aware of if, but apparently in writing about my little brother over the years, I’ve neglected to mention the career that he almost had; the one he dabbled in previous to his decision to make the practice of law his ultimate profession.

The Young Sportswriters of Orange County
While still a college student, Alex worked as a sportswriter for the now-defunct L.A. Times’ Orange County Edition from the early-to-mid 1980s. The late Mike Penner was one of his closest colleagues in that effort. They were good friends, well-respected, and appeared to both be on the fast track to local stardom as sportswriters in Southern California.

Penner actually came on a bit later, in 1983 and worked with Alex, often side-by-side, covering the local Orange County high school and junior college sports beats out of the L.A. Times Orange County offices in Costa Mesa.

My brother was a part of the same group of writers from which would emerge such current notables as Rick Reilly, Chris Dufresne, and of course, Penner; who went on to be a tremendous writer, and in most any other environment would have likely risen to the station of lead columnist.

However, due to the glut of organizational talent surrounding him at The Times, Penner had to settle for being just another great sportswriter in a department of great sportswriters. Nothing I have ever read or heard would indicate that he ever chafed at that status. That’s the kind of team player and non-assuming person he was.

Though their early roles on the high school/JUCO beat weren’t always sexy, both Penner and Alex were from time-to-time, given opportunities to write feature articles that appeared in both the Times L.A. Edition as well as its O.C. counterpart. Most involved the California Angels baseball and/or the Los Angeles Rams NFL football teams, both of which played in nearby Anaheim.

For Alex’s part, however, among his bigger splashes were a pair of rather controversial circumstances that didn’t necessarily feature his name in the byline.

The first occurred in 1983, when California Angels slugger Reggie Jackson was struggling through one of his worst seasons ever. Alex was gathering quotes for an article that would actually be written by another Times sportswriter, and in the course of the interview, asked Reggie a question that Mr.October apparently didn’t like.

The exchange quickly developed into a shouting match of apparently such epic proportion that the Hall-of-Famer to-be threatened to kick the young scribe’s ass.

But that was Alex. He was brash, confident, and knew B.S. when he smelled it (...and Reggie was usually full of it).

Then in August 1984, one of my brother's pet peeves, the Olympics came to town, being hosted in Los Angeles. In the midst of a sarcastic rant in the newsroom one day, a Times columnist absconded a quote from Alex that landed in a notes column appearing in the main paper’s sports section.

In it, Alex chirped, “The bad thing about the Olympics is that it legitimizes trash sports every four years.” It was but one sentence in a brief 61-word paragraph buried in a lengthy, four-column article, but the response to Alex’s statement ended up dominating the Times Sports ‘Letters’ section that week, as a host of angry readers took him to task for his contentious stance.

Yep. The boy was opinionated.

It’s important to note, however, that Alex wasn’t merely a shit-stirrer; that part of his persona wasn’t the norm. However he did have the balls as a writer to go with his gut wherever he saw fit; he wasn’t a yes-man; he couldn’t care less about being politically correct. he called it like he saw it.

He was as nice and as charming as anyone you’d ever meet, but cross him in an argument and you’d better remember to bring you’re ‘A’ Game. He was as skilled a debater as anyone I’ve ever witnessed — and as opinionated. His intelligence was almost annoying, but always as irrepressible as his vibrant personality.

When Alex went to work for The Times, huge sports fan that I am, I was as jealously proud as a big brother could possibly be for the direction his career seemed to be taking.

However after a few years, particularly when he and his wife decided it was time to start a family, Alex determined that the late nights, deadlines, and bar closings weren’t the ingredients of a future he wished to pursue.

He announced that he was leaving sportswriting behind in favor of a law career. He was subsequently accepted into a leading California Law school, where he went on to finish second in his class and serve as President of the Law Review his graduating year.
My initial reaction was mild disappointment over what I selfishly considered to be his giving up on a career at which he was obviously a natural to excel. However my disappointment quickly gave way to the awe and respect I felt in seeing him set his sights so high — and then going out and achieving them.

But then again, when he was a little boy, he always proclaimed that someday he’d be the President of the United States. Perhaps this was a logical first step, I remember thinking.

However if public office was an actual goal that he wished to pursue, it never got beyond the dream stage. He was indeed an outstanding attorney for 15 years, but appeared to be happy doing just that, while building a family and a life together with his wife, Saraph, including no further political aspirations (that he spoke of anyway).

Tragically that all changed once he began to succumb to the effects of Alzheimer’s. He officially resigned from the Bar Association in 2005.

Alex’s O.C. L.A. Times colleague, Mike Penner, on the other hand, would go on to great success with the paper. His life seemed to be the envy of anyone in his profession, with respect, great exposure, even the happiness of his apparent marriage-made-in-heaven to fellow Times sportswriter, Lisa Dillman.

But obviously things aren’t always what they seem; and as with my brother, Penner’s own set of demons would make themselves manifest a few years later.

Although I never met him personally, Alex’s numerous accounts involving the exploits of ‘The Penman’ (as they all called him), along with those of others in that stable of young sportswriters that now-Times Deputy Chief Sports Editor, John Cherwa had assembled in Orange County, made me feel as though I’d known him — and them — for years.

However the affinity I felt toward Penner was strongest for a couple of reasons; one being the fact that he and Alex were more or less partners in their duties during the entirety of the time they worked together. Just as importantly, Penner, went on to be The Times’ beat writer for my favorite baseball team, the somewhat schizophrenically-named California/Anaheim (and now, Los Angeles) Angels — which also meant that I read him religiously, even after I left Southern California.

I know how good he was and I know what a loss his departure truly is to the collective, quality fabric that makes up that outstanding newspaper.

But if you’re at all any kind of L.A. Times Sports aficionado, you likely also know that Penner’s intrigue as a person of interest didn’t just end with him being a fabulous writer; it quite literally ended with him being a tortured soul; it ended with him terminating his own life — as a man, when in fact he had lived most of the previous two years as a woman.

Next: Old Mike, New Christine, Same Demons

That Damned, Unnerving Uncertainty of It All— A Miniseries (Part 1 of 4)

NOTE: I’m all about full disclosure, and if the title of this miniseries hasn’t at least given you a clue, I’ll just go ahead and say it: this is not a happy story, and I make no apologies for that.

This is a tribute to two people (…or is it three?); one you know — if you’re a friend of this blog — and another you might know — if you’re an enthusiast of Southern California sports media. What you don’t know, is that the principals are related — in more ways than one.

That being said, it has taken me just over three weeks to ponder, research and write this story, and now that I’m finished, not only am I drained, emotionally, I’m sorta asking myself why I did it, because it really isn’t anything other than bad news. However bad news still needs to be told, and sometimes, even bares positive fruit.

So go pop a Zoloft, put away the sharp instruments, and pardon my melancholy as you learn a little more about a couple of outstanding and complicated people.

Rude Awakening
Ever the electronic packrat, I have genuine difficulty in erasing personal emails. I have nearly every meaningful one I’ve either sent or received since about 1999 — and probably many more than that stored within even earlier system backups. They’re holed up somewhere in some old backup program’s format that I likely no longer have the software for, on ancient DAT tapes that will probably never again be restored.

However I just can’t bear to toss those old tapes, y’know? I keep thinking, “maybe someday…”

Emails are like electronic time capsules; some providing more valuable information than others, but for me, even the most mundane trivia of my past is something I can lose myself in for hours.

The problem is that I don’t spend nearly the time I should, sorting through and determining what deserves to be kept and what should have never made it to my inbox in the first place.

Three weeks ago this past Sunday, however, I was engaged in the semi-regular activity of weeding through some of those old emails; judiciously purging the inevitable junk mail and other useless noise that I’d unintentionally saved over the years.

In the course of that process, I came across an exchange of emails I’d had with my sister in-law, Seraph, back in late April 2007, some five months prior to my most recent — and likely, my final — visit to Dallas to see my brother Alex.

The email made me smile; but it was a smile wrapped in sadness. It returned to mind a bittersweet moment in both the life of my brother as well as that of a friend of his, who was actually the subject of that communication.

Following up on that discovery of a few Sundays ago, I was curious to find out about the current status of Alex’s friend, so I investigated further to hopefully gain some kind of idea of that person’s current standing, as it occurred to me that I hadn’t read or heard anything about them in quite awhile.

There was a good reason that I hadn’t, but it wasn’t because no one else was talking about it.

Stop me if you’ve read this already…
It’s been quite awhile since I’ve written anything about my brother, whom If you’re unaware, is in the final stages of the insidious strain of Early Onset Alzheimer’s disease that has plagued my family for more than two generations (probably a lot more).

Although several maternal-side family members (including my grandfather, aunt, uncle, and mother) succumbed to the disease, we didn’t know a lot about the nature of how it was passed on until 1992, when my family took part in extensive genetic testing at the Indiana University School of Medicine’s Alzheimer Disease Center, in an effort to find a means to test for it.

Heretofore there had never been any reliable way to even detect Alzheimer’s prior to physical onset, which in the case of our family’s “pre-senile” variety, usually becomes manifest during the victim’s late 30s-to-early-40s. Even then, the disease generally takes a couple of years more to present itself to the point that the victim or family members become aware that something is truly wrong.

Fortunately, identification of the causal genetic mutation responsible for our particular brand of AD came to light a year later, based in large part upon the comparative research of our family’s genetic material, including that of my second-eldest brother, David, who was in mid-to-late onset at the time but would become my immediate family's second victim just two years hence.

The results of the research were published in a 1993 Lancet medical journal article. My family reveled in the joy that we had helped accomplish something that would not only serve our progeny, but that of generations to come, both within and outside of our family.

However, that joy was later all but totally mitigated when we discovered that we’d misinterpreted the test results, which had seemed to indicate (unofficially) that we were all in the clear, but in fact had thrown out several family members by necessity of the rules of blind clinical trial method; a fact that we hadn’t noticed, but which simple arithmetic would have been revealed, had we’d been paying attention.

Sadder still was the reality that one of the two family members who fell between the cracks was Alex, who began showing signs that no one acknowledged — the least of whom being himself — back in the early 2000s. By the time we allowed ourselves to consider that Alzheimer’s could be the cause of Alex’s rapidly-decreasing ability to function normally, it was already too late. He was positively diagnosed in November 2004, a year or more beyond the disease’s initial onset.

Although the introduction of recent Alzheimer's drugs Aracept and Namenda have slowed the progress of the disease’s advance and in have fact likely added at least two years to Alex’s lifespan, they have only postponed the inevitable.

[It’s a subject that one glance at my tag cloud (in the left sidebar) will tell you I’ve written a lot about, so I’ll dispense with any more re-hashing and refer you here, here, and here if you’re interested in learning the lion’s share of background info regarding the family curse.]

Though four years my junior, Alex was someone I revered like an elder brother. He was my lifelong best friend. Although I helped raise him as a child, there was never anything but total acceptance as equals between us once we became adults. We married the same year, spent time together both alone and with our families, and never hesitated to constantly affirm to one another how much they were loved.

Alex was my chief confidante; we trusted each other with personal details that will never reach the ears of another living soul. Knowing that I have now lost that outlet has been more than sad for me, so much more than a simple loss, but infinitely less than that which has been experienced and will forever be felt by the wife and three children he’ll leave behind.

Alex is now in hospice care and has been for several months. It is a general rule that hospice enters when the patient has a year or less to live, and so that would indeed indicate that the end is near for my beloved little brother.

He is truly a shell of his former self; unable to speak, feed, clothe, or bathe himself. He still lives at home, as he has from the beginning, a triumph of determination that my sister in-law set forth from the outset; that her husband would not die in a nursing home or other undignified facility as did all in my family who preceded him in this supremely unceremonious terminus of life. Her circumstances have been immeasurably trying and she deserves so much more credit than could ever be given her.

However my intent wasn’t to make this entry a premature obituary for my brother, but to also acknowledge my sadness over the other sobering news that I learned that late August Sunday afternoon.

Next: A Long, Long Times Ago...

A Place Called Blogsville (Epilogue)

Urban Renewal?
I was a year and a half behind the onset of Twitter before becoming truly involved with it in July of 2008, subsequently becoming a daily user some four months later.

In so doing, I also succumbed to the urge to join the masses of info-oriented, ‘useful’ bloggers out there whose content was shiny, new, ‘social media savvy’ and would draw advertisers to my site so that I could ‘monetize’ and make my blog an actual, viable income-producer. I mean look around — that’s the way it’s done these days.

My initial push to accomplish this was a complete flop. At the end of 2008, still buzzing from my newly acquired Twitter-inspired game plan, I mapped it all out, worked on a new template for weeks; I even wrote a few re-introductory posts for those outside the Neighborhood. I went so far even as to announce the 'rebirth of my blog, both in a post that was soon thereafter pulled, and on Twitter, only to back out when I realized I really didn't know what the hell I was doing it for.

Then the recession smacked me in the chops, big time. Right after the Holidays, The Company I worked for announced what would be the first of two workforce reductions in 2009. I was spared from the first one that came down in January, and then fully engaged myself in the subsequent yearlong scramble to try and save my ass from the second, later that November. On the second count I was obviously unsuccessful.

Now a year later and a half later, with nothing left to lose, I’m ready to try again and see just how good this blog can be.

As far as monetization goes, I’ve recently made a few small in-roads in that regard, but have vowed to myself to do it right. Fortunately I’ve become involved with a wonderful new organization of folks who are dedicated to teaching blog marketing techniques that are effective without being obnoxious. It’s called The Third Tribe and if you’re curious you can check them out here or anytime from the Third Tribe badge located in the blog’s right-hand sidebar. It’s pretty cool stuff, really, especially for someone like me who has always been repulsed by traditional Internet marketing methods.

But even if I do end up going with a few affiliate links here and there, there’s no way it will ever become my main focus — that’s not what AYBABTU has ever been about. Like I said earlier, I have struggled mightily with the idea of making my blog a more topically-based destination, and will always seek to exercise brevity in any way I can, but not at the expense of being who I am.

I do realize that my long-windedness can be a handicap to gaining and keeping new readers. But then I always have to return to the Hamletian maxim of, “to thine ownself be true.”

I can publicize this blog. I can monetize this blog. If the readers come, they come; if they stay, they stay. However I cannot be someone I am not, nor can I write like someone I am not — well, I probably could, but why? To what end?

I do consider this the start of a renewal of sorts, but I’ll just have to take it day by day and see what the future brings. I hope you’ll feel inclined to tag along.

But Just For Fun…
As I write this, it has now been exactly 30 days since the opening segment of this series was posted — not that taking a month to write five posts is such a rarity me, but this time it had a lot more to do with contemplation than procrastination.

Part of what has taken me so long to get back to this series has been in deciding how to end it (which is what I should have done before I even began the thing...but I digress...again). It took awhile for me to resolve the issues surrounding that which drove me to write it in the first place.

But I think I’ve got it now.

You see, this was more than simply a trip down memory lane. I’ve come up with a much more practical application for this piece — if I can manage to pull it off.

I’m getting the band back together.

I’ve recently spoken to a couple of my ol’ Blogsville neighbors on the phone, and it was absolutely fabulous. These two, I hadn’t had any significant communication with — quite literally — for years. Like many others, they’ve been around, just not out on the front lines like they were years ago. Some of my other former neighbors have become active on Facebook in recent years, a few more on Twitter; some have even remained active in their original blogs, although often with a largely different readership and/or social group than before.

As for my hesitation in wrapping up the series, I really didn’t like the direction it was going when I first began writing it. It was becoming a decidedly negative lamentation of my life over the past 3-4 years, which while true, was certainly not of a hue that I wanted to paint what was always intended to be a celebration of Blogsville — a somewhat melancholy celebration to be sure — but a celebration all the same.

I may use the 1100+ words I’ve now deleted from this post at another time, in a more suitable context. But for now, I’d much rather turn that frown upside down and end this thing on a positive note. But whether it indeed ends up being positive will ultimately be determined by you.

When remarking earlier about ‘TJ’s Place’ I noted that one of the things I miss the most about our old neighborhood were the comment sessions; that was where the community was generated. I would absolutely love it if we could all come together again — even if just this once — and experience a ‘comments party’ like we did in the old days.

My dear friends, LucidKim and Restless Angel have already chimed in. I’m hoping (provided all the old email addresses I have for everyone still work) to alert a number of our other former Blogsville neighbors as to this series’ existence and invite them back to comment as well.

But to make it really special, I would request that each of you who chooses to say hello, will take the time to spin together a few sentences, telling us all of what you’ve been up to, and hopefully, an email address or other contact information, blog or Twitter username, so that we might have an opportunity to continue the conversation elsewhere down the line.

I know it’s kinda nervy of me to expect that anyone would even want to do this, but geeze louise, you guys, do you not realize what a wonderful thing we all had together? It could be that way again, at least for a little while.

I hope you know how much affection I still hold for you all, and how happy it would make me to hear from you again.

So then, Mike? Lovisa? Jack? El Sid? Inanna? ESC? Esther? CCC? Queenie? Gooch? Jennifer? Kenju? Leese? NoMilk? Aimee? Victoria? Melinama? Anyone-else-I-can’t-think-of-off-the-top-of-my-head-right-now?

Whadaya say?

And to those of you whom I may be forgetting, as well as those who only know me from Twitter or elsewhere, thank you for being here too! Please say hello and join in the fun!

Lastly, but not leastly…
As if this series hasn’t taken enough twists and turns, there’s still one more.

As often happens to me, when I begin writing, sometimes things end up growing and expanding and going off in different directions than those in which I first intended.

What was originally supposed to be a few paragraphs in the series prologue sorta took off and assumed a life of its own shortly after I began writing. I let the idea play out, circled back and decided to include what had become two full posts as an addendum instead. What began as the historical backbone for the series, turned into a standalone biographical sketch of Pyra Labs, the original creators of Blogger.com.

It’s a separate story unto itself, but it still works within the context of the series. It’s a look back on the history of Blogger.com from its pre-Google inception, which is actually when I first became involved with the service as a member of a multi-author blog group of online friends. We used ‘The Blog,’ for a lack of a better term, as a message board.

Back then I didn’t have a clue as to whom Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan were, and neither did much of the web world. But as the co-founders of Blogger — the one that started it all — it certainly does now.

In recent years, Williams has continued to push the envelope with his ‘other’ little social media project, along with Biz Stone, called Twitter.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading this account of a great moment in web history as much as I did in researching and writing it.


Next: Addendum (Part I): Ev and Meg’s Excellent Adventure

A Place Called Blogsville (Part IV)

AJ 2.0
Trends come and trends go; sometimes it’s easy to forget that. For example, back when my daughter Amy was in middle school, one of the many fashion trends of the mid-90s was the revival of the styles from the 1970s ― a time that I know quite well.

So enamored was Amy with an iconic man-made fabric of the era that was now once again wildly popular, she one day exuberantly declared to her mother and me, “Polyester will NEVER go out of style!”

Heh, we’ve NEVER let her live THAT one down…

But to be fair, haven’t each of us fallen victim to that same sort of short-sightedness at one time or another? Haven’t we all latched onto something new that we thought was “life-changing,” or was the next-big-thing-that-we-can’t-live-without; confidently asserting to anyone listening that nothing would ever be the same; that we would forever be changed by that wonderful new paradigmatic epiphany?

I’ve decided that to a large degree, personal blogging was that way for a lot of folks heading into the mid-2000s — at least that seemed the case in our Blogsville neighborhood.

In our early years together it was indeed life-changing, much in the same way that chatting was for people in the mid-1990s; a real phenomenon, and very important for a time. But in the end, it was simply another ‘next big thing’ and once it ceased to maintain that fashionable status, people began losing interest.

Don’t believe me? How much have you heard about MySpace lately?

However it’s unfair to totally place the two in the same boat, particularly given the somewhat well-deserved, seedy reputation that internet chat rooms subsequently earned as a breeding ground for cybersex and predatory behavior. Blogging on the other hand has always been on a much different level; it obviously requires a greater, more honest commitment, both emotionally and practically. It’s hard work, and is not an undertaking for the weak-willed — that is, the weak-willed who are also without conscience.

That being said, there are times when I really have to search my own motivations as to why I always return to personal blogging no matter how long my absence — almost as if my life depended on it. I’m pretty sure a lot of my former Blogsville neighbors have thought about it in a similar vein at one time or another. However in the end, not everyone has the time or perhaps the amount of self-loathing of someone like me to goad them into continually getting back up on that freakin’ horse.

I am now convinced that I must write; I am enslaved to the notion. Why? Who the hell knows? But one thing is for sure, when I got bit by this bug six years ago, it actually did change everything for me. Trouble is, the other things in my life that had also changed made it all the more daunting for me to keep up.

A Rude Awakening
With the popularization of the ‘Web 2.0’ movement, which I began hearing about sometime around 2006 (but which had actually been in the process of implementation since the late 90s), I knew I was out of step and wasn’t ready to deal with it.

The constructs of the modern, social web took a quantum leap forward on a number of fronts, from around the time I began blogging in 2004 to just beyond the mid-decade mark; and quite frankly, I was oblivious to it all.

Suddenly it seemed my long-winded, narrative style had become less and less relevant to the now-assumed reality of daily, social information-based posting. Most of the successful blogs I was seeing were no longer static, personal essays, but living, breathing, social organisms, teeming with useful information and comment interaction; cross-linked and shared via Delicious (formerly known as del.icio.us), Twitter, and Facebook. It all seemed to happen at once for me; but in reality, while the changes did come about quickly, they were over a much longer period — I just hadn’t been paying attention.

Looking back on it now, I was stuck in somewhat of a feedback loop. Lots was going on in my head, and even more in my life; I just couldn’t seem to get it all out of myself with any semblance of the consistency I had in the beginning, when the stories of my life and family seemed to flow out of me in a never-ending stream of content.

Besides, what was going on in my life at that time wasn’t stuff I really wanted to celebrate, as had been the motivation for my previous work. I second-guessed nearly everything I wrote, becoming tentative, overly self-conscious, and feeling like a hypocrite for letting it all ‘get to me.’

As I stagnated, it seemed as though the neighborhood was withering as well. Most seemed to begin making the same transition away from daily or even weekly blogging, and moving more toward social networks like Facebook and later, to a lesser degree, Twitter; where we slowly found each other and began re-asserting ties that had linked us previously in Blogsville.

And while I certainly can’t speak for anyone else’s opinion, I think the new landscape is certainly a beautiful one in its own way, but it’s just not the same kind of community we had before.

Having been part of the blogging’s inital wave as a mass medium — an early-adopter even though ‘weblogging’ had been around some ten years previously — there was a certain level of pride one felt in being ahead of the curve.

In 2004, blogging was still relatively unknown amongst the general populace; something that seemed ‘weird’ to the average Joe. It was far from the now-widely recognized medium it has become.

However it all seemed to change so quickly, and by 2006, my once-enviable ‘informed’ position had turned on me — or was it I whom had turned away from IT? I found myself in a position similar, social media-wise, to the one I was currently embroiled in professionally, having sailed through the first half of the 2000s as a web designer who didn’t know crap about something as game-changing as CSS, and was now in a mad scramble to step it up or lose my relevance — even my job.

As a result of both my sudden shift in motivation to become current with modern web technology, and the paralysis of my frustration with the changes in the blogging landscape, my blog post production — as well as a heapin’ helpin’ of my perceived personal relevance — all but dried up.

Now, nearly three years later I’m attempting to kick off that creeping malaise. I have already hit rock bottom professionally, having been laid off from my employer of nearly 12-years last November. And even though I did manage to bring my sagging web-tech skill-set up to standards over the last couple of years, the fact that my job performance was allegedly a non- factor in my demise doesn’t provide me a whole lot of solace. It’s more than a little unsettling to go from being indispensable for years, to suddenly finding yourself thrust back into the job market, entering your mid-fifties; competing for jobs in an industry inherently dominated by twenty-and-thirtysomethings.

Sometimes changing with the times is a personal option; for me, right now, it most certainly is not. I’m in a ‘roll-or-BE-rolled’ position for the first time in my professional life.

As to the extent to which I can do anything about the perception of my age as I seek new employment, only the market knows for sure. On the other hand, the blog world, for the most part, is ageless — and thanks to genetics and personality, I’ve never looked or acted my age.

As a blogger I have begun to embrace the change of the now-dated ‘Web 2.0’ moniker — albeit sometimes kicking and screaming — and I have also begun seeking ways to regain my relevance in this continually evolving medium.

Twitter was the biggest step for me, although it has in some ways been somewhat counterproductive to blogging. As a self-described micro-blogging platform, tweeting not only relieves me of the need to express myself via daily posting, but also of the associated guilt when I fail to blog. And while the association of any kind of guilt with personal blogging may seem an absurd notion to most, that’s just me; I know it’s the way I am and I’m tired of beating myself up for it or trying to change my stripes. I will always feel the need to write, and the obligation to myself of the same.

However, as fantastic a conversation vehicle Tweeting is, I need to be able to go deeper. That, I now know, will never change.

I’ll never abandon this house. No matter the condition of the neighborhood or the number of its residents, Blogsville will always be my home. I may spend some time in other abodes, such as my weekend winter cottage, but this is the place I will always come back to.


Next: Urban Renewal?

A Place Called Blogsville (Part III)

The Neighborhood
It’s amazing to me how slow the first half of the recently-completed first decade of the new millennium seemed to pass, versus the last five years, which appear to have evaporated right before my eyes.

Forever ensconced in the midst of that decade will be the three-year period between 2004 and 2006, when I discovered blogging and The Neighborhood was in full swing.

The ‘Hood was in a town we called Blogsville, in a country known as Blogger.com.

We all moved in at about the same time, discovering each other en masse; visiting each other often, attending each other’s parties, and generally, having the time of our lives together.

That strip club I mentioned earlier? There was nothing salacious or untoward going on there; just a bunch of wonderful stories from a guy who managed a strip joint in Florida.

Life at TJ’s Place was one of Blogger’s most popular sites of 2004, and as such was constantly listed on the homepage’s ‘Blogs of Note’ section. Naturally, newbies to Blogsville would visit to see what was going on, and subsequently, a lot of us ‘met’ each other there in the blog’s comments section.

Kevin, the blog’s author was an incredible writer. Despite what you might think, his stories were extraordinarily human in focus and compelling beyond belief. His blog served as the focal point of our neighborhood.

TJ’s was the ‘Motherblog,’ the first of what I liked to refer to as one of the ‘party blogs.’ Those were the places you could always count on finding a ‘live commenting’ gathering in progress on most nights. It was fun. We learned a lot about each other, were introduced to their blogs, and many of the friendships sparked — both ‘cyber’ and ‘real-life’ — have lasted to this day.

It was all so new; so different; so cool. We grew close; very close — some of us, too close.

We all told our stories, shared our lives, revealed our secrets, and listened while others did the same.

There were disagreements, friendly spats, and all-out wars. There was friendship and there were breakups. There was laughter and there were arguments. But much more; there was encouragement; substantiation and confirmation; hope and belief in one other — and thereby, ourselves.

But just as happens in those of brick & mortar, our online community’s resident’s life-circumstances changed; and unfortunately, after only a few months, our little Blogsville neighborhood began to collapse almost as quickly as it had formed.

Kevin, by his own admission, ‘burned out’ by August 2004. Another popular blog, The Abysmal Life of Crayon, also checked out that month. Over the next 2-3 years, more and more folks were showing up less and less.

Some left the neighborhood altogether; others became all but inactive in the group conversation; some just ran out of things to say, or refrained from being so open as to reveal information that might be passed on to outsiders.

In recent years, the neighborhood has almost ceased to exist. Oh people still own the houses, but they’re rarely home. They don’t come out on the front lawn to talk nearly as often as they once did in the old days; they pretty much keep to themselves, occasionally raising the window to throw out a few thoughts from time to time, but seldom are there others around to listen.

The neighborhood has indeed coalesced; those who have remained active have their individual friends that they hang out with, but the block parties are no more.

Just like Real Life?
It’s amazing how closely the dynamics of my old virtual neighborhood have followed that of the physical cul-de-sac I lived on, in Franklin, TN from 1994 to 2007.

Back in ‘94, when our subdivision was brand new, we started like a house afire, and now 16 years later, only two families among the eleven originals on my old block remain.

At last report, I heard that my former physical neighborhood is now comprised of 25% rental properties. For the majority of the original homeowners, it was their first home. Most of them have since ‘moved on up to the East Side,’ so to speak. The neighborhood hasn’t gone completely to pot, though; it’s still a tidy, middle-class ‘burb neighborhood, but it’s definitely lost that new-‘hood smell.

And that’s life; we’re all responsible, but it’s really no one’s fault. It just happens. Same thing applies to my Blogsville neighborhood. It was a phenomenon in the lives of those involved; a phenomenon that had a shelf life which none of us could foresee.

Yet in some cases, the bonds have remained firm. In my case, one of those in particular required some real-time face-time to become immutable.

LA Stories
Something else was different five-or-so years ago: the economy. I had a good job, gas prices were relatively manageable, and somehow, I had considerably less month at the end of the money most of the time.

My Dad, who still lives in Southern California, is in his mid-eighties and 5-6 years ago I had the money to go see him often. I made it a point to get out to California at least once a year. In ’04, I made it twice; once in May ― just before I started blogging, and a second time in August ― not long after having been swept away by it.

Along with seeing my Dad, I had additional motivation as well: to see my friends; the real-time pals of my youth who have always been a big part of my life and desire to make the numerous visits to SoCal that I have since leaving the area in 1992.

Before heading out on second trip to the ol’ homestead, in August, I decided to throw out a fleece and pretty much blindly arrange to meet someone whom I barely knew, but had recently begun running into often in Blogsville.

Michael agreed to meet me for dinner in Santa Monica and we instantly connected. We’ve remained pretty close friends ever since.

The Light’s On, But There’s Nobody Home…
But within a year of that trip, things began to change. The economy, from my standpoint, anyway, began to tighten. By 2006-07, my job security was creeping onto tenuous ground. Fuel prices went sky high, as did most everything else; at the same time, Michelle and I were buying a new house and adding a third more money to our previous monthly mortgage payment.

While I can’t blame the stress I endured at the hands of the economy, I certainly can say that the uneasiness I felt about my job security had an effect on my writing. I lost confidence in myself on a number of levels. I went from someone who had absolutely everything going his way to just another scared, middle-aged Boomer, suddenly out of touch with a rapidly-changing tech world. To say it took the wind out of my sails would be an understatement.

I found myself staying later at work, studying coding technologies in my spare time that I now had to know, both at work and on the weekends, and experiencing the numb, burning sensation on the back of my neck that makes you feel like you want to just burst out of your skin.

Meanwhile, back in my Blogsville abode, I sat and stared out the window most of the time; too stressed to write, too scared to really talk about what was first and foremost on my mind — my real-time job. I tried, though; I came close to breaking trough a couple of times, but for the most part I was writing more apologies for not posting than I did writing many substantive posts.

People would try to tell me not to be so hard on myself (thank you, Brighton), but in reality, I was really trying to apologize to myself.

Next: AJ 2.0

A Place Called Blogsville (Part II)

Googled
As great as things were moving along, little did we know that behind the scenes, a pattern was developing that would be repeated across a wide spectrum of web-based companies throughout the 2000s, and Blogger was one of the early ‘victims.’

Growing, but still struggling, Blogger.com was purchased by Web-giant, Google, in February 2003. At first, it was no big deal to us. In fact, the news brought with it a sense of pride, given that Google was sort of the epitome of the kind of growing, aggressive, cool, Web company who started out little and just ran with it. Those of us who had been involved with the business of the Internet for years were encouraged to see a company truly emerge from the DotCom Bust with signs that they really were going somewhere; that the Web truly had a future based on measurable success, rather than merely unfounded speculation as had been the case in the DotCom Boom years.

Google had it together, and we all assumed that what was good for Google would be good for Blogger.

Only one thing though; we soon learned that what was good for Google was good for Blogger — it just wasn’t good for ‘The Blog.’

On May 9, 2004, Google announced the new, massively significant upgrade of Blogger.com. The typical style of blogging, having been incredibly influenced by the medium’s biggest growth spurt: the 9/11 catastrophe, had shifted.

The term, ‘weblog’ didn’t quite apply as it once did. In the 90s, the medium’s early adopters generally held to a style in keeping with it’s name: a log, i.e.: a series of brief, understated, usually off-the-cuff remarks, generally not more than a short paragraph or two.

The format for weblogs was then, generally a galley list of posts, all on a single web page divided only by the week or month.

However, with the citizen-journalist sea change of post-9/11 commentary, blogs were now becoming decidedly more essay-related in length and scope. The new upgrade to Google’s version of Blogger would reflect that.

There would still be the digest front page, containing a dynamically-created run-on list featuring blog entries of a determinate span of time, but now the layout emphasis would be of a format to support longer, individual page blog entries.

The old template we were running still worked, but the publishing process had changed completely.

This rather played havoc with our groups’s faux forum purposes for using Blogger, so on May 9th, 2004, as the rest of the blogging world rejoiced, the TK Bloggers cursed the ground that Google walked on. We walked out in favor of finding new digs, in an actual message board environment that closely simulated our old Blogger home. It took some doing, but thanks to some geeks a lot smarter than me, we got it worked out, and we still meet there today.

But what to do with Blogger?

Curiosity and the Inside Joke
With the new Blogger now up and running, I couldn’t help but remain interested, however in practical terms, I still had no real idea what a blog was, even after being a registered Blogger user for nearly two years.

For purposes of posterity and reference in daily dealings with my TK buddies, I certainly wasn’t going to cut myself off from access to the old account, but I also decided to poke around the new and improved dashboard and see what possibly creating my own blog would be about.

Then about a week and a half after we pulled up stakes on the old blog, somebody posted a link to one of the new, upgraded Blogger.com blogs. The site was creating quite a stir in the local Washington DC media, as it involved the kiss-and-tell-all details of a Congressional page and a prominent US Senator.

The scandalous exploits of The Washingtonienne were, well, interesting to say the least. But even more interesting to me was the concept that one could lay out a story like that for all the world to see, and all you had to do was type it and press a button. I, at that very moment, ‘got’ blogging for the first time.

However I had no illusions of grandeur, thinking someone would find anything I had to say interesting. Instead, I saw it as a way to pull a rather inside joke on my pals.

As I explain in one of my info-pages found in the blog navbar, ‘What happen?’ is this:

We had long since carried on a running joke in the group about a key phrase from an otherwise obscure late-1980s video game called Zero Wing. The mangled-Japanese-to-English transliteration of, ‘All your base are belong to us’ had become a geek catch-all phrase in the late 90s. The application, in varied, crazy forms, was rampant on message boards all across the Internet.

So I decided to create a new blog and call it, All Your Blogs Are Belong to Us, assuming that at least one of my buddies would find it, get the joke, and we’d all get a big laugh out of it.

So I did. On May 24, 2004, I created my blog and started posting — fairly innocuous stuff at first — waiting for someone to notice. But no one ever did.

However, something completely unexpected happened. The more I wrote, the freer I felt; like a great weight on my shoulders was being lifted; it was cathartic. Apart from a few lengthy emails, I had really never before expressed myself by way of the written word, and the feeling was absolutely liberating.

I kept writing, and waiting for someone from my TK group to comment — in my blog’s comments or in our private forum — but no one did…for awhile, anyway.

I posted on disparate subjects; from the etymology of the word, shit, to the mountaintop experience of my very first rock concert, seeing The Beatles in 1964 at the tender age of eight years old.

I found myself in an increasingly comfortable place. I didn’t know where I was going, but I was certainly enjoying the ride.

But it wasn’t until I stumbled upon a virtual strip club that I realized I was in the right neighborhood.

Waaait…c’mon, nah! Get your mind outta the gutter!


Next: The Neighborhood

A Place Called Blogsville (Part I)

In a Blog of my own (Revisited)

While I may not have any sordid escapades to write about like the Washingtonienne, it's going to be kinda cool to just post a little stream-of-consciousness every now and then.

I would like to officially thank my Blog comrades in TK fandom, who on a daily basis, make me meaner, more irreverent and a more than just a sight bit smarter, as the inspiration for my Blog moniker. It has absolutely no significance to me or my life, but it makes me laugh every time I think of it. Those who know where it came from will get it immediately; those who don't, won't.

I'm not exactly sure what I'll do with this thing. It'll probably be a series of random thoughts composed of equal parts friends, family, music, sports, and personal history. I'm kind of excited about the idea of chronicling reviews and thoughts about the many concerts and music shows I attend; just to have a record of the experience. I've never kept anything that resembled a journal before, so this should be fun.

I'd also like to talk about some things that I think about a lot: friendship, loyalty to ideals, genuineness, my wife and kids, and other things that make me happy. If anyone reads any of this and wishes to comment, I'd welcome the dialogue.

Well, here we go...

:)

That was my very first blog entry, posted exactly six years ago today. I really didn’t know what to expect of this medium, which I’d actually already been a part of for nearly two years previous, because I still didn’t have a sense of what was bottled up inside of me that needed to get out.

Mister Tony Made Us Do It
I was a part of a group of sports talk fans who in the early 2000s listened with great enthusiasm to former Washington Post sportswriter, Tony Kornheiser’s daily talk show on ESPN Radio. You may have heard of Mr. Tony’s broadcast show on ESPN TeeVee, Pardon The Interruption, in which he banters in crossfire-style debate on topics of sports and pop culture with his good friend and former colleague at the Post, Michael Wilbon.

If you know anything at all about Kornheiser, it’s that he’s hilarious, whether anything he says about sports has any other value at all. So I began listening — and laughing — regularly, at just about this time of year, April/May of 2002.

I discovered this group of mutual Kornheiser enthusiasts purely by accident, while trolling the ESPN.com message boards. They all used to congregate in the Major League Baseball forum there on the web site. That was the point at which I realized that I could actually listen to ESPN Radio online from my desk at work; previously The Company had blocked streaming audio on our network.

I began to participate, familiarizing myself with the members of this TK group, and had a fabulous time laughing quietly in my cubicle as I worked.

Then in July, the always outspoken Mister Tony was suspended for comments critical to ABC/ESPN management and their handling of the events surrounding the recent firing of Tony’s radio show producer, Denis Horgan. The message boards went wild, and the TK group staged a war of words (and deed) with ESPN.

That quickly got the MLB board shut down, temporarily quashing the voices of dissension. However we continued on with a continuous stream of complaint emails to upper management (along with a few other less public forms of protest).

By this time, we were all connected via email, but given that we had lost our means of more immediate dialogue, it was clear that a new forum needed to be found. But message board software was expensive, cumbersome to install, and time/resource-heavy to maintain. We needed something cheap (read: ‘free’) and easy, and we needed it yesterday.

Hence, ‘The Blog’
As a result, one of our group’s members suggested a new, free online service that supported this new phenomenon called, ‘weblogging,’ which I had absolutely no concept of at the time.

The site was called Blogger.com, and we found that the way it was set up, we could actually use it as a kind of faux forum by assigning each of us as an author.

Blogger’s format (typical to how most people composed their weblogs in the early days) was not so much based on individual page posts, but rather on those consisting of a brief paragraph or two; from the blog homepage, they were displayed in digest format with the author’s name and post timestamp appended to each entry. As a group, we simply had to publish the blog after each of our posts and everyone would then be able to see it, updated online, en masse.

I knew nothing about Pyra, the parent company responsible for this wonderful little service. I knew nothing about their previous struggles and growing pains over their previous three years of existence; I knew only what we all knew: that Blogger was now the greatest thing since sliced bread.

It was mid-to-latter 2002, and fortunately for us, Blogger.com was gaining momentum, both from within as well as without; but more on that later.

Our new ‘forum’ was operating flawlessly (most of the time, anyway), and in it, we happily congregated, commenting, and contributing to each other’s Tony Kornheiser experience. However we didn’t meet only during the show’s three hours each weekday. Someone was pretty much always there most of the time, chit-chatting, spinning stories, telling jokes, whatever. A profound, albeit testosterone-dominated community was forming; and it was good.

Guys were becoming friends. Despite how much we ragged on each other — oh, and believe me, it was merciless at times — there was always a sense of community, and a deep-down respect for all.

Our new community had no official name at this point, but since it was born of a place called, ‘Blogger,’ we universally referred to it as, ‘The Blog.’

We still do.



Next: Googled

A Place Called Blogsville (Prologue)

Waxing Sentimental
I usually do a special post on the anniversary of this space, which today marks six years for AYBABTU. However I’ve never really taken the time to talk about why I got started blogging, and how my concept and awareness of it as a medium evolved to get me to the place I was six years ago today.

I think I’m gonna do that now.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written a post like this. Heck — it’s been awhile since I’ve written much of anything at all. But I’m not gonna worry about that; not right now; hopefully not ever again. Seven months of forced self-employment has taught me a lot about priorities — not to mention the value of melancholy as a state of mind for me.

See, navel-gazing is an art form that comes pretty naturally to me, and to be perfectly honest, has always been the basis of this blog, whether I like it or not. I don’t write 5-Steps To a Happier ‘X’-kind-of-posts. I write long, thoughtful essays about my life, my memories, and the people I love.

After struggling to morph my style into something more akin to the today’s ‘grip it and rip it’ mentality of ‘useful’ blogging, I’ve finally decided I might as well go with what I know.

I’m a thinker, and this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately; somewhat initiated by the previous Happy Birthday post to my friend, Michael, who is the greatest personification of what I value the Web as a social medium to be. The fact that he and I could become friends, coming from different parts of the country, with totally different backgrounds (not to mention, upon initial introduction, thinking that each other was sort of a jerk) is simply amazing to me, and not to be taken lightly. It’s something to be celebrated.

However, in the yin/yan of relationship, where there is celebration on one end of the dynamic, the opposing emotion can present itself just as powerfully on the other. The mourning of friendships that die from malnutrition is often sad; even more so because sometimes the death is inevitable.

This is a look back at the beginnings of my personal experience with blogging as a social medium and community-generator. It took place at a time when social media was in its infancy, and its effect, decidedly more dramatic — in my opinion — than it is even today.

It’s about a place that has always been my touchstone as a participant in the SocMed phenomenon; a place that revealed a side of me I never knew existed; a place called Blogsville


Next: In A Blog of My Own (Revisited)

Olympic Chillin’ @ O’Chuck’s

Sometimes ya can’t measure a ‘good time’ in 140 characters or less.
This is gonna be relatively short, and I'm duping this post here on my personal site as well as my hockey blog for a couple reasons; one: I just have to make mention of it, and two: I’m simul-posting to AYBABTU because it has as much to do with my personal life as it does hockey.

Sunday night the Nashville Predators hosted another ‘Chill-Out’ Party at O’Charley’s restaurant in Franklin, TN. The occasion was of course the much-anticipated heavyweight Men’s Hockey bout between the USA and Canada at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.


_{“I WENT TO A HOCKEY VIEWING AND A BLIZZARD BROKE OUT.” No, not really; there really was a game on the big screen TeeVee and much hoopin’ hollarin’ and carryin’ on ensued. A disk jockey from 107.5 The River (center) works the crowd.}

Not only was it a meeting of the only two remaining undefeateds in the ‘Group A’ division, as well as a natural blockbuster- must-see match-up by virtue of the natural rivalry between the Americans and their neighbors to the north, the game also featured the local attraction of the Preds’ top defensive pairing of Ryan Suter for the US and Shea Weber for Canada going head-to-head.

To the delight of the packed-house, ‛Sutes’ came out on top.

In a wildly competitive affair, the Americans defeated Canada 5-3, weathering a furious second period shooting storm from their opponents in the first period, then dialed up the intensity to match them in second, and shut them ‛em down in the final stanza, stunning the Canadian Dream Team going away.

If you want a further description of how the game unfolded, I'd invite you to visit my friends, On the Forecheck or Preds on the Glass; they do a much better job of that stuff than I do. Just wait until you’re finished reading here first, aiiight?

The only other thing I'll tell you about the game was that on the USA’s fifth and final goal (an empty-netter by Vancouver Canucks forward, Ryan Kesler), I had the pleasure of leading the room in a rousing chant of, “WE GOT FROS-TIES (clap-clap-clapclapclap), WE GOT FROS-TIES (clap-clap-clapclapclap),” etc.

Yeah I was loud. I was yellin’ at that big screen just as if I was in my own living room and all the people around me were my welcome guests. And the great thing about it was that I’m sure that everyone in that room felt exactly the same way.

What a great group of hockey fans we have here in Nashville! I know, I know, there are great fans all across the NHL, but if anyone anywhere wants to even THINK that Nashville isn’t a vibrant, enthusiastic, knowledgeable hockey market, they would be wrong; dead wrong.

As great as the game was, the party was even better. Gnash was there, as were the Predators EquiplinQ (and no, that’s not a typo), issuing Predators swag to all. Nashville FM radio station 107.5 The River did a great job hosting the prize giveaways during the first intermission (I won a $25 O’Charley’s gift card!). It was loud and raucous and fun.

And as great as the game and the party and the festive feeling that everyone shared, the thing that made it all so great for me were the human connections I made there.

Twitter is great because of the way it diffuses our natural guardedness; it gives us a sense of security to more-or-less be ourselves in a mass group circumstance in a way we most likely wouldn’t if we were in the same situation meeting that same group of people face-to-face.

Heh — let’s be real here. If we were all meeting as many folks as we generally communicate with on Twitter in a real-life sitch, heck, we probably wouldn’t even be heard, for all the people in the room. However, as it is, with Twitter we have the opportunity to be real with the whole Twitterverse on a one-to-one basis.

Given that easy familiarity, it makes expanding those connections even easier when we meet these ‛friends’ in real life.

Seeing Puck City (for the first time)
When I arrived at the viewing party, the room was already filled with hockey fans just buzzing about the game that was soon to start; no seats to be had anywhere. I looked round for familiar faces and thought a few of them registered, but none strongly on the AJ Friend-O-Meter. The waitress who deftly handled the entire room of 50-6o people (which is only a wild guess on my part, there may well have been more than that) was standing nearby taking drink orders from an adjacent table when I decided to be assertive and ask if it would be possible to get more chairs to accommodate myself and the three or four other folks standing there in the door near me.

She politely suggested I go ask the hostess, which made sense. But as I began to duck out of the room to go up front in search of my question's answer, someone called out my name, “Hey, AJ, wait!”

I did a slight double-take in the 3-4 feet in the space of the I had traveled and stuck my head back into the room. “Who said that?” I asked. “Did someone call me?”

The gentleman in the near booth to my right turned to say, “Yeah, it was me. We have a room in the booth if you wanna sit here.”

The man was sitting next to a young woman and another guy across from her, but the seat directly adjacent to his was unoccupied. Of course I enthusiastically accepted his offer. “THANKS!” I exclaimed. As I scanned the faces of he and his party I was trying to figure out the connection, but couldn’t. “How is it you know me?” I asked, sliding my hiney into the booth.

“J.K. Robbins...See Puck City.” And immediately the lightbulb came on. “AH! At last we meet,” I said, beaming.

I was thrilled to meet one of the few remaining Preds bloggers I had yet to run into at one of these Tweetup/Meetup events. J.K. started his Predators blog about the same time as I did mine. We hadn’t met, but I’d commented a few times on his blog, SeePuckCity. He introduced me to his friends, all roomates: the lovely SPC Steph, who co-authors the blog on occasion to his right; Jamie, the gentleman to my left.

Left to depend on the kindness of strangers once again, my new friends came through, big time. We spent the remaining 15-20 minutes before game time about Twitter, the Preds, and our mutual Nashville blog network buddies and acquaintances, and then shared the game together with the rest of the room as if we’d been tight for years.


_{CHILLIN AT THE CHILL-OUT. Left to right: AJ, Jamie, SPC Steph, & fellow Preds Blogger, J.K. Robbins of See Puck City.}

J.K. Robbins is a funny dood. He has a sharp wit (see his version of the viewing party and note his superb snideity in how he describes the EquiplinQ dancers — and BTW, if you’ve never heard one of their radio commercials, you won’t get it; but if you have...brilliant!) that comes across in his writing, but is especially entertaining in person. I knew nothing about him prior to Sunday, save that he was a Preds fan and a smart writer. Now I know enough to know that he’s also a guy I wouldn’t mind hanging out with from time to time.

But I’m gonna stop short of sending a corsage and asking him to the prom...just in case my wife is reading this.

Seriously though, it's refreshing to know that as isolated as we can sometimes make ourselves in social media, all the while convincing ourselves we’re really ‘connected’ because we chat with possibly thousands of peeps each day on Twitter, it’s still that human experience that completes the effect.

If you’ve never attended a Tweetup, you should. You really don’t know what you’re missing.

If you’re a Predators fan and have never attended a Preds Tweetup or other fan event, Gnash will officially come to your house to terrorize your dog.

All the calories, none of the ‘G’
Oh, and speaking of terror, buddy, you don’t know what skeered is until you’ve received the stink-eye from our favorite repelling feline.


_{GNASH WAS EVERYWHERE; the cat couldn’t stand still. He was so active I couldn’t even get a clear picture…geeze.}

Just when I was thinking we were old pals, at one point during the second period of the USA/Canada game, during an especially furious onslaught of Canadian shots on U.S. Goal-keep, the Buffalo Sabres, Ryan Miller, two Americans were trying to wrest the puck from Columbus Bluejackets All-Star forward (and the BJ we most love to hate), Rick Nash.

I shouted out instinctively, “KILL NASH!”

Now if I’d said that on Twitter, there wouldn’t have been a problem. However Gnash, who was standing about six feet to my left couldn’t see the lack of ‘G’ in my real-life ‘tweet’ (and if you knew what my actual speaking voice sounded like you’d appreciate that little euphemism a whole lot more), and...well, let’s just say, I doubt I’ll be on the Big Kitty’s Christmas Card list this year.

But phonetic disparities aside, a great time was had by all.

Reconnects
As an added bonus in the human contact area, I had a chance to spend some time with a couple of great Preds fans I had actually met briefly in person at a recent Preds game, as well as a former co-worker I hadn’t seen for months.

Shelly, her husband and her daughter Raven actually sat in the seats just to the right of ours in Section 329. At the time, we exchanged pleasantries, but never introduced ourselves. But when they walked into the viewing room Sunday night, I recognized them immediately. However I didn't know if they remembered me. We made eye contact a few times, and they gave a look as though they thought I looked familiar, but just couldn't make the connection.

After the game, as I was leaving, I sought them out to say hi assure them that I didn’t have a chain saw and chloroform in my trunk.

I reminded them of where we’d met and we had a great conversation. I discovered that they too are on Twitter, so if you want to follow a fantastic and fun Mom-Daughter Preds fan duo, be sure to visit @dont_puck_it_up (Shelly) and goalies_are_hot (Raven).


_{MY FRIEND, @christinewhite just HATES to have her picture taken…yup…that’s what she told me…just before she said, “Don’t make me sing…”}

My former co-worker, Christine, is one of my longest-standing fellow Preds fans. We worked together forever at The Company — she still does — and I hadn’t seen her since well before I was laid off in November. Chris is another fun and bright individual worth a follow on Twitter (@christinewhite).

All in all it was one of the better Preds outings I’d been to. I hope you’ll make it out to the Gold Medal Party February 28th at Bleachers Sports Grill, also in Franklin, which promises to be an awesome time as well.

Who knows, maybe we’ll be celebrating a U.S. Olympic Gold! And you know, there’s no better people to celebrate with than REAL people.


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Somebody Must Be Tryin’ to Tell Me Something

At this rate, I’ll never get my introductory posts finished for my new blog launch! However this is something that happened to me just tonight, Tuesday evening. It had a pretty big impact on me, so I felt the need to share it.

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Rainy-Day Tuesdays
I mentioned earlier that this will be a busy week, and one of the activities occupying three nights of it is NHL Hockey.

I’ve been a season ticket holder of the Nashville Predators since the 2000-2001 NHL season. I’ve followed the Preds in that capacity from their third year of existence, watching them develop from expansion-team futility into one of only five teams to make the Stanley Cup Playoffs currently four seasons running.

Yet for all their apparent success, they’ve never made it out of the first playoff round, and that lack of ability to take the next step has hurt more than just the pride of an organization almost universally regarded as one of the best run in all the NHL. In addition to the obvious ‘so-close-yet-so-far’ frustration felt by everyone — especially the fans — it also seems to perpetuate the nagging cloud of doubt that has hovered over this team from the beginning: will Nashville support an NHL team in a city with a sports mentality dominated football and basketball?

Well, thankfully, this story isn’t gonna tackle that question. However it was necessary to bring it up in order to set the mood I was in tonight as I headed down to the Sommet Center to watch our team take on the visiting Colorado Avalanche.

This season has been especially frustrating, mostly because the Predators aren’t scoring like they have in years past. But I’m not even gonna talk about that, except to say that this current dearth of biscuits-in-the-basket had led directly to what going in to tonight’s game was a four game losing streak — three of which have been at home, where the team usually performs extremely well, even in bad years.

After becoming so used to all the successful home cookin’ the Preds have enjoyed the past three seasons, in which they’ve had the second-best home record in all the NHL, seeing that trend come to an apparent abrupt halt has been buggin’ the hell out of me.

It’s gotten to the point that tonight, while I should have been confident and excited in anticipation of seeing my team begin the turnaround of their recent woes, my attitude was much more ensconced in worrisome anticipation of what bad thing was going to happen next.

Add to that the fact that the weather was lousy: 40something degree temps in a steady, cold rain. Add again the fact that I was also going to the game alone, as Michelle had to run our dog, Spotty, to the vet because her neck had swollen to twice it’s normal size during the day today. Our doggie is fifteen and a half years old, so any kind of health problem at this point in her life could indeed be very serious.

So here I am, with all these things going on, already miserable, and walking the last of my typical six-block jaunt from where I usually parking for free, down to the arena.

As I approached the last crossing prior to my destination, there on the corner stood a young man, soaked to the skin in the rain. I was already late, so I really didn’t notice his behavior until I was but a few feet from him, near the crosswalk. I say this because I don’t know whether he was beckoning each and every person walking by for money or if it was just lucky ol’ me, but as I approached him, I knew the look in his eye. It was no surprise when he softly asked, “Sir, could you spare a dollar so I can go buy a cheeseburger?”

Now if the dude had been wearing a LOLCats t-shirt, I probably would have stopped and pulled out a buck or two just for the irony of the situation.

Just kidding; actually…I wouldn’t. And that’s the problem.

Divine Intervention
Again, I don’t pretend to assume that I know what anyone else would do in that situation. I know there are a lot of folks who would have had compassion on the guy and given him the money as asked, or more. I know there are some folks who would have even offered to take him to McDonald’s and buy him an entire meal. And I also know that are those who wouldn’t have even acknowledged his presence; their response would have been to just keep on walking.

As for me, while my polite nature wouldn’t allow me to completely ignore him, my hard heart didn’t exactly embrace his situation, either.

In response to his tentative entreaty I quickly replied, Nosir, I’m afraid I don’t have anything for you, today” and I continued on across the street, towards the arena.

Almost immediately I felt a pang of anguish stab me in the gut. I said to myself, “Man, I wish I hadn’t just done that!”

I continued my hurried pace toward the arena’s side entrance, still another 50 yards ahead, beating myself up more and more with every step. At least three times I thought, “why don’t you just turn around and go back and give the man a lousy dollar! That’s all he asked you for.”

But in response a thousand other voices in my head simultaneously shouted down the better angels of my nature, warning of everything from possibly being robbed at knife point to the cynical suggestion that dude would just go spend that dollar on crack or booze.

But no matter how much I tried to take solace in the cautions being justified by my conscious mind, my heart was making me miserable. I felt horrible.

My mind decided, “If he’s still standing there after the game, I’ll be sure to give him a few bucks.”

My heart shot right back, “He won’t BE THERE after the game, you idiot!”

Then…

Then something — or someone — intervened.

I was less than a few feet from the turn down to the arena side entrance when I spotted something. I really couldn’t believe my eyes.

There, lying on the wet sidewalk, still partially dry, was a one dollar bill — folded lengthwise and then again in half. From the second I spotted it, ten feet away, I knew what I had to do.

I reached down to snatch it off the sidewalk, did an about-face, and burst into a full sprint back to the corner, 50 yards up the street, to where the young man was still standing in the rain.

As I approached him, I’m not even sure if he recognized me as anyone with whom he’d already spoken.

I reached out my hand and said, “I swear to God, I just found this lying on the sidewalk. I think it was meant to be yours.” I handed him the twice-folded bill and began backpedaling across the street, again in the direction of the arena.

His countenance beamed as he realized what it was I’d placed in his palm.

“Hey! That’ll hellp!” He said with a big grin, “Thanks! And God bless you!”

“God bless you as well, Sir,” I called back and continued on to my hockey game.

Y’know, I didn’t once think about him spending that buck on anything illicit; it didn’t matter. Giving it to him was what had to be done. Besides, I’ve given money to panhandlers dozens of time before, and I think I know by how they receive it, just how much they need it, and whether it’s for something to make them better off or something to make them worse.

But the vibe/reaction from this guy told me all I needed to know.

This was one of the weirdest, most blatantly obvious divine interventions I’ve ever been involved with. And pardon me if you think that’s an idiotic way to look at it, but that’s my take-away from this thing.

Sure it could have been a coincidence, but I can tell you — I just don’t find money lying on the sidewalk all that often, do you? And given that the man had asked me for that exact amount? I mean, c’mon.

But the point of this whole thing isn’t about what a great benevolent human being AJ is. But rather, it’s just the opposite.

I hardened my heart to some one who asked me for a FREAKING DOLLAR, which I most certainly had to give him, but refused, and then tried to justify it by assuring myself that I’d done the right thing.

Nevertheless, someone needed to set me straight; almost as if to say, “Okay, if you don’t know how to do it, allow me to show you.”

This was an intervention, folks; a heart intervention for AJ.

So what does it mean, really? I haven’t a clue, except that I know somebody was trying to tell me something; something like, “it really doesn’t belong to you anyway — why not use it with a heart of compassion rather than one of stone?”

I also believe it means I need to start listening to that still, small voice — even when the big, loud ones are doing their level best to drown it out.

Maybe that should be my first New Year’s resolution for 2009.

The second? Hmmm…

Maybe I should just stop worrying about the Predators so much.

Meh…it’s a thought….

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Shea…Goodnight

Stirrin’ Up the Ghosts
It happens without fail; a venerable stadium or sports arena comes to the end of its lifespan and no matter how flawed or frayed it’s reputation or viability over the course of its advancing age, a flood of emotion and sentimentality always swells within the public and the press.

Now I’m not usually given to parroting news articles I read for use as blog subjects. However this morning while in the midst of our Sunday A.M. ritual of coffee, quiet conversation and the Sunday Tennessean newspaper, I became aware of something that I’m really not sure I knew before I read it. The more I read, the more emotional I became. Twinges of sharp sentiment filled my chest as the story brought to the surface memories that had lay dormant for years.

If you have any more than a modicum of awareness about the current doings of Major League Baseball, then you know that world-famous Yankee Stadium closed its doors last Sunday night. The New Yankee Stadium will open for business next spring in is new location right across the street from its esteemed predecessor.

However New York’s ‘other’ baseball team, the Mets, despite its own storied past, is also getting a new stadium next year. But I’ll be damned if I was aware of it.

The author of the Associate press article I read pretty much assumed that; his opening line: “By the way, Shea Stadium is closing, too.”

The article went on to celebrate the stadium, located in Flushing Meadow, NY, a place not only rich in sports history as the home of the Amazin’ Mets of 1969, but also that of the old American Football League’s New York Jets, who upset the NFL’s Baltimore Colts in Superbowl III that same year behind Quarterback ‘Broadway’ Joe Namath’s ‘guarantee’ of victory.

Several other non-sporting events dot the landscape of Shea’s forty-four year history. Of the most notable were The Beatles groundbreaking first U.S. major outdoor stadium concert on August 15, 1965, and the October 3, 1979 Pope John Paul II visit in which the Pontiff supposedly stopped a steady rain by the raising of his hand.

That wasn't the only miracle seen at Shea; in the summer of 1969, they seemed to occur there on a nightly basis. A team that had up to that point been the joke of Major League Baseball would finally come of age; and in the process, ignite the love of sports in a young boy observing, nearly a thousand miles away in rural Indiana.

(My) Amazin’ Mets
Given that I’m such an unabashed California/Anaheim/Los Angeles Angels baseball fan, and have been exclusively for thirty years, it’s not something I’ve spent a lot of time talking about, my onetime affection for the New York Mets. But for a period of about ten years, beginning in 1969, I ate, slept, drank, and breathed the New York Mets. They were my introduction into the phenomenon of sports fandom.

In ’69, when I would turn thirteen years of age, I really wasn’t all that much of a sports fan; of course that fact wasn’t because I hadn’t been surrounded by it. In my sports-mad family, my Dad was a big-time Chicago Cubs fan; my elder brothers pulled for the Cincinnati Reds. But if anything, my baseball allegiances fell in the direction of the New York Yankees, due to them being the favorite team of my best friend at the time, my Cousin E. He was by far the most influential person in my life during my early adolescence. Between my 3rd and 7th grade years we were inseparable; I looked up to him like a big brother. So naturally, as E rooted for the Yanks, I rooted for the Yanks. But at the end of the day, I was just imitating someone whom I respected; I really don’t remember having any sense of connection with the Yankees or any other team. I was just tagging along with the bandwagon.

And then along came Jimmy Qualls.

Urrrghhh…Freakin’ Jimmy Qualls.

A career minor leaguer in the Chicago Cubs system, Jimmy Qualls spent a grand total of two-and-a-half seasons in the big leagues, amassing 141 at-bats strung out over 63 games. To say he was a marginal player is an insult to margins. Nevertheless, his 15 minutes of fame are fixed in the annuls of Baseball history.

The day after one fateful game, on July 9, 1969, a newspaper article changed my life. The game it reported launched an obsession and perhaps a miracle as well.

Tom Terrific
In 1969, Tom Seaver was a young 25 year-old pitching prospect in his 3rd season with the Mets. He had already had two back-to-back 16-game winning seasons for a horrendously mediocre Mets franchise that was now finally beginning to open some eyes with their better-than-expected start to the season. They were chasing the division-leading Cubs, who appeared to be the class of the National League, and hosting them at Shea Stadium for what would turn out to be a pivotal series.

Seaver was magnificent that night, mowing the Cubs down inning after inning. After eight rounds at the plate, the Cubs still hadn’t managed a baserunner. Tom Terrific, as the New York press had dubbed him, carried a perfect game into the ninth. Three outs to go, to achieve the rarest of pitching feats.

After getting the first out on Randy Hundley’s failed bunt attempt, up came Qualls. No one in the humongous crowd of 59,083 thought that the little-known rookie was any match for Seaver, but on this night, he was.

Qualls laced a soft line drive into left center field for what would be the Cubs only hit — or baserunner of the game. The Mets won 4-0, but Seaver lost his perfect game bid. Nevertheless, that performance by the Mets’ young ace is unarguably regarded as the catalyst game of the Mets’ pennant run. After having trailed the Cubs for the division lead by 8 games on July 4th, this victory fueled them into overtaking Chicago and going on to win their first Word Series title.

But the next day, when the Associated Press reported the story of Seaver’s near-immortal game, it was painted as if Obi-Wan Kenobi was explaining a ‘great disturbance in the Force.’ How dare this little pipsqueak deny Tom Terrific of his date with immortality! Jimmy Qualls name became mud in the New York media and in my mind as well.

I read the article, reprinted in the local newspaper, not because I cared about the Mets at that point, but rather because of the front page-of-the-sports section photo of Tom Seaver, displaying his now-famous knee-drag delivery, making a pitch during his one-hit performance. The photo’s caption read, “A very determined young man.” That description intrigued me, so I read on, becoming entangled in the drama of the story, so beautifully crafted — albeit one-sidedly so — by the New York-based writer.

How could you not root for a talented, determined young man like Seaver, leading his team, once the laughing stock of baseball, to a date with destiny?

This is my first and most lasting memory of Shea Stadium, although I didn’t know anything about the place at the time. I would however know plenty before the season was over, as I immediately became a Mets-Maven, and most accurately, a Seaver-Sycophant.

Everything went right for the Mets from that point forward. The Impossible Dream would be realized. New York would go on to win the division, the National League pennant, and finally, capture the World Series title from the heavily-favored Baltimore Orioles. I was on Cloud Nine. The Mets were MY team, and WE had won it all.

Kinda screwed over my expectations for future seasons though…

Life in a New Citi
Shea Stadium has seen its last game. Unfortunately, the Mets of 2008 couldn’t pull off the magic act of their predecessors of 39 years ago. It came down to the last game of the season, Sunday. Had the Mets won they would have forced a one-game playoff to determine the NL Wild Card team in the playoffs. However they fell short in their last stab at bringing an October game to their venerable home field.

But they’ll just have to wait until next year, beginning a new chapter in a brand new state-of-the-art ballpark, which like the New Yankee Stadium is slated to be ready on Opening day of 2009.


Unfortunately, the construction of the new Citi Field just beyond the outfield walls were all the Mets faithful had to look forward to after Sunday’s final game at Shea Stadium.

Photo courtesy Nick Laham/Getty Images

The new ballpark, will (initially at least) carry the corporate brand of financial giant Citicorp. Citi Field is currently under construction in the parking lot of Shea Stadium, which will be razed over the winter.

It’ll be bigger, more comfortable for fans as well as players, and should provide an exciting new element for the Mets faithful.

I always dreamed of one day attending a game at Shea, now sadly, that’s never gonna happen. But I may be able to eventually take in a game at Citi Field, hopefully before they tear it down.

I’ve decided that if that opportunity ever presents itself, I want to try and figure out where, in what will be the parking lot of the new stadium, the old one once stood. It’d be kinda cool to at least imagine that I was standing in the spot where the old pitching mound was; where Tom Seaver and his mates plied their magic so long ago, when the Mets truly were ‘amazin.’

Here’s hoping on behalf of Mets fans that some of those ghosts still roam the meadow.

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